If you’re looking over the NHL betting board and want an unbiased second opinion, then scroll on down to the Cheat Sheet. A very busy computer crunched a bunch of numbers from this season and the last to produce an analytical summary of the day’s available bets. Do the numbers match with your opinions, or do they throw your predictions for a loop?

Scroll down to find out.

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INDEX:

as sim. Fv/Dg: This is the team’s record this season as a similar-sized favorite/underdog.

Circles: The circles indicate the strength of the play on the side relative to the other available plays on the day. A white circle indicates a highly recommendable play on the day, whereas a black circle indicates a highly not recommended play. Circles highlighted in green represent the most highly recommended plays on the day. Plays are recommended based on a team’s projected chances of winning, the line value in a team’s betting odds, and also the reliability and availability of statistics to support the recommendation (see ‘Stat Balance’).

Arrows: The arrows indicate whether the prediction favors a play on the Over or the Under. Upward arrows point to the Over, and downward arrows point to the Under. Horizontal arrows are neutral.

Score: Projected to be the most-likely score for the game. The numbers are color-scaled red-purple-indigo-blue, with red being the highest and blue being the lowest.

shot%: This is the average of the team’s projected shot percentage and the opponent’s projected save percentage.

SOG: This is a gauge of how many shots on goal a team is projected to have. A checkmark indicates a more than average amount, an exclamation mark indicates an average amount, and an “X” indicates a below average amount.

PP: This is a gauge of how well the team’s PP is projected to do against the opponent’s PK. A checkmark indicates above average, an exclamation mark indicates average, and an “X” indicates below average. The amount of PP opportunities that the team is likely to receive is also factored in, so if the team’s opponent is discipline, then success on the PP will be projected to be less likely.

Stat Balance: This is used as a gauge of how reliable the statistics used in the prediction are. The system uses statistics from both teams’ records, but it is rarely perfectly balanced, due to differences in situational games played. The closer this number is to 1.00, the more balanced the stats are for this prediction.

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Saturday’s Cheat Sheet: (goalies and odds as of 2:00 PM ET)

An opinion or two:

– Whew, the odds for all the games have finally come out. Think they scheduled enough games today? Also, as usual, the next edition of the Cheat Sheet will be on Monday.

– In what might turn out to be a very tight game, there appears to be a little bit of value with the Rangers in Columbus. At least we know that one of these teams definitely has goaltending issues, while the other definitely does not.

– Montreal has responded well after losses this season, while Toronto really has not. I’m surprised to see fairly even action on this game on some books. How often do you see a division leading team as a pick’em against the 13th placed team in the conference? The value is probably with Montreal here.

– Speaking of Montreal, I’m pumped up for UFC 124 tonight. I can’t wait to see “the bully [is going to] get bullied” (in French-Canadian accent). Sorry NHL, but tonight Canada’s attention turns to the Bell Centre for a much bigger event than regular season Habs vs. Leafs.